


Three Sentence Ficlets (Dark Is Rising)

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: 3 Sentence Ficathon, 3 Sentence Fiction, Despair, F/M, Family, Gen, Illnesses, Painting, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 21:48:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four tiny ficlets written for the 2013 Three Sentence Ficathon hosted on Dreamwidth by rthstewart.  1) The White Rider at the end.  2) Owen Davies and Gwen.  3) Barney, painting.  4) Alice Stanton and her youngest son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. home from a terrible dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ailavyn_Siniyash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ailavyn_Siniyash/gifts).



> These ficlets were all written in response to prompts left by Ailavyn_Siniyash, whom I would like to thank for the inspiration; I had a lot of fun writing them! *grin* (I also managed to stay within the three-sentence form limits, which I am usually _very bad at_. *is proud*)

**home from a terrible dream**

They fall out of Time, a single moment of despairing fury stretched thin and taut across all eternity, for there is no longer any possibility of change, or regathering, or fruition: nothing but an endless, clawing void, the true vacuum never found in the natural world. The White Rider hears her brother scream, and scream, and scream, one breath caught forever in disharmony with her own, and she cannot grow accustomed to the sound, or tired of it, or even aware of how long they have been screaming.

 _John, you fool, I would have made you king_ , she thinks, and thinks, and thinks again, one final point of consciousness crystallized in pain and horror's amber as she falls; she has made him immortal after all, and amidst her breathless, endless scream she almost draws breath to laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _the Dark, banished._


	2. once upon a myth

**once upon a myth**

He knows, of course, that it is all nonsense, that Gwen is merely another note in an age-old tragic song, only an ordinary woman from an ordinary city or farm, trapped in a narrow, loveless marriage with a brute of a man until she gathered her scraps of courage for the sake of a newborn babe and fled seeking a devil she didn't know: that her strangeness is easily explained by the terrible things any man can do to another, beating down a soul with words and deeds for year upon year upon year. There is no need for magic when human cruelty will serve.

But Owen was raised on legends of Arthur, both the pretty tales of chivalry and the older stories that the Saxons and the French left out -- the tales where Arthur was first and foremost king rather than husband or father, and ordered the death of any child who might be his bastard, fate-shrouded son -- and when Gwen speaks with an accent he cannot quite place, when she looks askance at his car and telly and toilet, when she murmurs names in her sleep he thinks he almost understands... well and so, a man can dream of timelost queens and fancy himself a knight, can he not, so long as the work gets done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Owen Davies, 'i always knew who you really were'_


	3. but where do your ideas come from?

**but where do your ideas come from?**

Most of Barney's work is done fast and sure in bright acrylics: jagged, stylized figures that whirl through the motions of ordinary life made a half-step strange by nothing more than the grace of paint and his eye for a carefully frozen angle, and sold for a handsome profit and a growing name. But now and then he finds himself stuck, staring at a canvas with brush in hand and no idea what to do, mind mute and entranced as if soft, bright fog is rising from his soul, thinning in tantalizing swirls over some massive, life-shaking truth he can't quite grasp; and so he takes out his watercolors and paints Welsh landscapes, Cornish seascapes, trains and mountains and impossible trees all drenched in a ceaseless, sourceless light.

Those paintings he does not sell, but keeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _any, on the edges of memory_.


	4. last and least (and loved)

**last and least (and loved)**

"Gone lazy on me this morning, have you?" Alice Stanton asked, sending an indulgent look across the kitchen toward her youngest child as he slouched into the room and slumped at the table long-since abandoned by his more punctual siblings; perhaps he had been up too late last night, making the most of summer's ragged end before school resumed tomorrow, indulging in childhood as he so rarely did since his eleventh birthday.

Will looked up at her voice and Alice frowned at the sight of his face, pale and drawn in a way that suggested more than simple lack of sleep; she set the glass and rag down in the dishwater, wiped her hands, and hurried to press her wrist against Will's forehead: heat seemed to spill from him as if fire ran under his skin, and when she glanced down at his eyes the whites were bloodshot and suffused with a faint, unnatural tinge of yellow.

"I-- on the day-- I can't--" Will said, one hand rising to clutch weakly at Alice's arm before falling slack as his eyes slammed shut and his head lolled back, and then somehow she was hauling him to his feet, bracing his full weight -- as limp and boneless as a sack of flour -- and shouting for Roger to call Dr. Armstrong before it was too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _the Stanton family, fear._


End file.
